[SSD][Filesystem] Ideal filesystem for SSD based notebook?

adbge · n00b Joined: 27 Dec 2009 Posts: 2

I'm trying to decide what filesystem or filesystems to use for a fresh Gentoo install on an OCZ Vertex SSD drive. The drive is within a notebook PC.

What I'm looking for in a filesystem:

fast.

Anyways, feel free to post whatever you got. Informative articles, unrelated SSD tweaks, filesystem rants, pictures of your ex. Whatever, use your imagination.

Cygon · Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2009 10:53 am Post subject:

I just finished installing Gentoo on an Intel SSD.

From what I've read, I think your best candidates would be XFS and ext4. Both deliver cutting edge performance and have a 'nobarrier' option that makes them fly by disabling safety flushes of the drive's cache. A laptop would be ideal. Both file systems don't like unclean shutdowns - especially XFS is known to leave 0-bytes embedded in files that were being modified at that time.

Another thing that might affect performance would be the file system's alignment. It was a real odyssey collecting informations about how to perform alignment, so I made a small article from what I've learnt:

Aligning an SSD on Linux

In short, I've manually set the (virtual) heads and sectors number in fdisk to guarantee its cylinder boundaries are a multiple of by SSD's erase block size and then used --stride and --stripe-width (for mkfs.ext4) to make my file system try to align writes. There's lots of advice on the OCZ forums as well:

OCZ Forums: Tips, tweaks and alignment

cach0rr0 · Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2009 7:21 pm Post subject:

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 1:43 pm Post subject:

drescherjm · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 3:50 pm Post subject:

cach0rr0 · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 8:28 pm Post subject:

drescherjm · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 8:45 pm Post subject:

cach0rr0 · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 8:52 pm Post subject:

xaviermiller · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 9:15 pm Post subject:

Hello,

When I had the very awfully slow SSD on my Acer Aspire One (replaced by a 1.8 hard drive), I begun with ext4, then switched to ext2 + using tmp and many things in RAM, and the system were a little more reactive.

The really big problem is the awful write performance, especially with Firefox and applications that use a cache.

So, try to avoid to write to disk, for example by using tmpfs in RAM (and upgrade the memory to maximum), or avoid the SSD by booting on a USB disk, or replace it (a 120 GB drive costed me 50 GBP in eBay).
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drescherjm · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 10:32 pm Post subject:

Or get a fast SSD. I paid $185 for my used Intel 80GB 25x-m shipped. This is way more expensive than a hard drive but its much faster. Even with writes.
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My gentoo overlay
Instructons for overlay

rjw8703 · Posted: Wed Dec 30, 2009 8:27 am Post subject:

Also, if you use ext4, you get the TRIM function, as long as you are using a kernel > 2.6.27 and a recently new drive that supports TRIM. I'm not exactly sure what TRIM does, but it does keep your drive running 95%-96% as fast as when new. If anyone knows how to get TRIM running in gentoo, I would like to know.

syntropy · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2009 Posts: 8 Location: Western Canada

Wasn't NILFS supposed to be used on SSDs?

rjw8703 · Posted: Wed Dec 30, 2009 9:04 am Post subject:

I do know that I have TRIM running in Win-7 using NTFS as the filesystem. What I don't know is if TRIM is running in Gentoo using the ext4 filesystem. As far as I know only NTFS and ext4 are the only filesystems that are capable of running TRIM. But I also want to say that I'm not an expert in this subject. I get most of my info from reading other peoples work, and I don't know how much expertise they have.

cach0rr0 · Posted: Wed Dec 30, 2009 9:52 am Post subject:

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

IIRC it was btrfs (not nilfs) that was meant for SSDs and that it had a special SSD mount option.

I mentioned in another thread already but it bears repeating here, ext4 can be run without a journal just like ext2; "mkfs.ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/sdxyz". I don't have a spare SSD to test it on but it should make a huge difference.

SvenFischer · Veteran Joined: 05 Feb 2003 Posts: 1033 Location: Berlin

If we have this, what do you recommend:

HDD for multimedia files
SSD for windows 7 and Gentoo

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Questions:
1. What kernel scheduler (noop/cfq)?
2. /root filesystem should be ext4, because of the TRIM Feature, but if the SSD has it's own internal TRIM like Intel, what to use instead?
3. Why should i disable the journal? What happens if ther's an unpropper shutdown (crash/no electricity)? Usually the kernel caches a lot, also for save actions, right? What kernel/option should I have to use to let the kernel save immediately?
4. Is it a (better) must to put all /tmp and /var to tmpfs in RAM. If so, should /var be synced to disk when shutdown or isn't the data necessary?
5.
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adbge · n00b Joined: 27 Dec 2009 Posts: 2

gringo · Advocate Joined: 27 Apr 2003 Posts: 3793

yngwin · Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 3:59 pm Post subject:

I use and recommend JFS on laptops as it is more efficient (low cpu usage), mounts fast, and is a modern journaled filesystem. That being said, btrfs is starting to look like an interesting option too.
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